Why I’m Leaving Vox
Welcome to Nixon by Name. I should explain why I’m here. I have been a very happy Vox user for just about a year now. I like the community spirit, I like the design, and I like the simplicity of use. These features are all brilliant for the new blogger. There are not many blogging systems where you have an immediate audience straight out the box.
Over the last few months, however I have begun to feel restricted by what Vox had to offer. Keen to avoid the fugly interface problems that have beset MySpace, they do not allow you to add in many extras. This is in many ways a good thing, but for those of us with half an ounce of taste, it has just meant that we cannot do what we want.
To my point. Last month, without warning, or even announcement Vox decided to restrict their RSS feeds to two lines of text, and a thumbnail of any photographs or videos. This means that any of my readers now have to click through to the web site to get more than the vaguest idea of what I’m writing about. As a result I have found there is much less interaction on my posts. Viewers just aren’t bothering to click through. Why should they…they don’t know if there is any point.
I understand that Vox want to drive traffic to the site, but that is not compatible with my needs, which is to make it as easy as possible for my readers to read and interact with my writing. I think Vox have made a big mistake. I think they’ll find that instead of pushing users to the site, many users will not bother. I know I didn’t.
As I have made the move to here, I have also got the feeling from Vox that I do not own my own content. There is no way to export my posts, and that is extremely annoying. They want to tie me in, so I must start fresh here.
So it’s goodbye Vox and my neighborhood over there, and hello WordPress. I wish you all the very best. Please pop by to say hello. I may pop past to say hello every now and again, many of you are very good writers, and I wouldn’t want to miss that. If any of you have blogs outside of Vox, let me know your address in the comments, and I’ll add you to my Google Reader feeds.
UPDATE: Nick O’Neil from Vox responded by saying: “Sorry to see you leaving - however, your full feeds are still available for your blog, they’re just located at atom-full.xml rather than atom.xml (the trimmed feed). They’re auto-discoverable, just like the trimmed feeds so any feedreader will detect them just the same. Do come back if you’re ever missing Vox!”
However I think it’s all very well the full feeds being available, but they are not obvious to most users…and especially those that have already subscribed to my feeds. It’s a cheap little trick by Vox, and I think it’ll backfire on them unless they do some back tracking.
